18.03.2004 (By Berta Joubert-Ceci, Workers World) Signed by President Bill Clinton with the cover of combating drug trafficking, this military aid package has given billions of dollars to the Colombian government for military equipment and training. This money reverts almost totally to U.S. arms manufacturers in the form of military contracts.

In the face of growing opposition to the agreement and to neoliberalism in general all throughout South America, the United States is desperate to impose a free trade area in whatever form possible. This makes Colombia--with its geographic location as the door to South America, its vast natural resources and the complicity of its President Alvaro Uribe Velez as Washington's junior partner--the perfect target.

For decades dozens of U.S. corporations have reaped huge profits from the cheap labor of Colombian workers. Occidental Petroleum, the main U.S. oil corporation active in Colombia, Coca-Cola, Dole, Drummond, Exxon Mobil and Monsanto are some of the best known corporations. But there are also less well known military contractors like DynCorp and Military Professional Resources.

Coca-Cola started in 1942 with a plant in Medellin with a ,000 investment. Over the course of 60 years the revenues have multiplied 65,000 times, making Coke one of the 10 most profitable companies in the country.

Coke has accomplished this not only with technological advances but also through extremely repressive anti-worker measures--often, for example, using violent methods to lower productions costs.

Coca-Cola and other U.S. companies use the services of death squads--the paramilitaries, among them the Colombian Self Defense Units "AUC"--to terrorize workers and their families through threats, kidnappings, disappearances and murders. It's all in an effort to destroy workers' organizations and thus lower production expenses. It has been proven that the paramilitaries work in conjunction with the Colombian government.

The rush to open the Latin American market to U.S. finance capital with no restraints--what the imperialists call "free trade"--is bolstering Uribe's murderous, repressive policies. As a loyal collaborator, Uribe has imposed a series of "reform" measures along with a policy of "democratic security" that has intensified poverty among the Colombian masses and made any opposition to his policies a crime. U.S. capital could not have a better servant.

Plan Colombia has, particularly since September 2001, abandoned its supposed anti-drug cover to openly target the armed insurgency of Colombia, the FARC and the ELN, the oldest guerrilla movements in the hemisphere. Thus Uribe refuses any negotiated political solution to the armed conflict.

Government, paramilitaries and corporations work hand in hand for the benefit of capital--mostly U.S. capital.

This repression has now made it next to impossible for any organization even remotely connected with the aims of the guerrilla movements to function in Colombia. Afro-Colombians, women's organizations, students and youths, religious and human-rights groups, non-governmental organizations, and especially labor unions are all being penalized.

With no evidence, corporations like Coca-Cola frequently publicly link labor leaders to the armed insurgency, making them targets of the criminal paramilitaries.

Washington thinks that if the repression decimates unions and other progressive organizations that oppose Uribe's policies and U.S. interests in Colombia, the United States can use that country as a cat's paw against the rest of Latin America--particularly against Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez' Bolivarian Revolution is advancing and setting a glorious example for the neighboring countries.

It is no accident, then, that in the Arauca region in Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, paramilitary activity has increased. In the last few months the regime has carried out mass arrests of human-rights and religious activists.

It is also in Arauca where Occidental Petroleum's oil pipeline Cano Limon starts, guarded by U.S. and Colombian military. In this region paramilitaries often try to cross into Venezuela in an effort to help destabilize the Bolivarian process.

For these reasons it is urgent that progressives in the United States show the utmost solidarity with Colombian activists who face criminal actions against them coming from paramilitaries or state terrorism. They are mounting the most courageous resistance.

International observers are urgently needed to witness and accompany Colombian workers and activists, and expose to the world the crimes committed in the name of U.S. and other transnational companies and capital.

For more information about international delegations contact SINALTRAINAL the Coca-Cola workers union in Colombia at:  areainternacional@sinaltrainal.org.